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Why Russians have two blues: how a colour word can speed up your eyes Russian has two basic words for blue, goluboy (light) and siniy (dark), and in a 2007 experiment Russian speakers were about 124 milliseconds faster at telling… Language4 min read27 Oct Why a sentence can nest forever on paper but not in your head: centre-embedding The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt. It is perfectly grammatical, and almost nobody can read it. English lets you tuck one clause inside another… Language4 min read23 Oct Why Latin p became English f: Grimm's law and the sound-shift chain Latin says pes, English says foot. Latin tres, English three. Latin cornu, English horn. The swap is not random: when the Germanic languages split off, their… Language5 min read16 Oct Why English plurals say s, z or iz: the wug test Say 'cats' and 'dogs' out loud and listen to the last sound. One is a hiss, the other a buzz, and 'buses' adds a whole extra syllable. English spells all three… Language4 min read13 Oct Why the same sound is a b to English ears and a p to Spanish ears Say "bat" and "pat". The only physical difference is a tiny delay between your lips opening and your vocal cords buzzing, about 12 milliseconds for an English… Language3 min read4 Oct How a 9th-century scholar cracked secret codes by counting letters For roughly nine centuries after Julius Caesar, swapping each letter for another was a perfectly good way to keep a secret. Then, in 9th-century Baghdad, the… History5 min read30 Sep Why everyone agrees which blob is 'bouba' and which is 'kiki' Show people a soft blob and a spiky star and ask which one is bouba and which is kiki. The words are made up, yet in the classic version of the test about 95%… Language5 min read27 Sep Why the most common words are the shortest: Zipf's two laws of language Count the words in almost any long text and a strange pattern appears: the most common word turns up about twice as often as the second, three times as often… Language5 min read26 Sep Why English spelling doesn't match how words sound Around 1400, English spelling roughly matched speech. Bite sounded close to "beet", meet roughly like "mate", and house like "hoose". Then, over about three… Language5 min read26 Sep